Recently spent a couple of weeks tooling around New England, and I couldn’t help noticing the hard cider scene there was very competitive. Craft beer was quite numerous and competitive as well, but the cider section of any given store was always much bigger and more prominent than I’m accustomed to. All I usually see around my neck of the woods is what you’d find anywhere: Angry Orchard, Strongbow, Woodchuck, etc.
The most common brand I encountered throughout Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maine was Citizen Cider which I drank and found was consistently good throughout their line (my wife and I both particularly liked the ginger-infused one), but I had a ton of other ones that I can’t name that were also excellent.
Quite a few have popped up in Montana, also. My favorite is Rough Cut Cider out of Kalispell, but many others are good too. I have always preferred cider over beer, and while hard seltzer is making a run at it, I’ll stick with cider for now. I started drinking hard cider in the UK in the 90s. At the time, it was considered a lady’s drink, and probably still is.https://roughcuthardcider.com/
My mom made her own hard cider. She would buy a gallon of raw cider [not pasturized apple juice, blech] and set it on the back step of the garage. The next week she would buy another, and move the previous one into the fridge inside as it was now hard. She would progress like that, as long as raw cider was available. One on the stoop fermenting, and one in the fridge being drunk.
The last time I visited my mother before she died, I still drank very occasionally, and since hard cider was something I liked, and I knew that it was true that New England abounds with it, I tried it at a few at restaurants there. Had the advantage of using Ubers or having other people driving in other ways too.
I noticed that the cider there was particularly strong. I never asked about the ABV, and it wasn’t in the menu. The stuff was always served in glasses, so nothing to check. But I’d get through 1/2 a glass, with food, and get dizzy.
I have had 8% ABV Wicked Red, and that I can also feel, but not so easily and quickly. Woodchuck et al. are usually around 5%, and are like soda, unless, I suppose, you chugged one, which I have never tried.
I also noticed that the cider in New England tended to be real cider-- it tasted hard, but it also tasted like cider, not apple juice, and was cloudy, as you would expect.
Yeah, it was interesting the variety in it. We stopped at a cider-specific place that offered a cider flight (just down the road from the Ben & Jerry’s factory; crazy busy there, even on a weekday) and they were all just as different as beers or wines. Some were sweet, others very dry, most somewhere in between, but in any case were all still very distinct.
Seems pretty competitive in the Northern Wastes of the U.S. as well.
The first cider I ever had was a tall cylinder of very dry, very flavorful cider at an upscale bar. It looked beautiful with large, perfectly clear ice cubes under multiple Christamas tree lights, and I loved it (it was Crispin, from Minneapolis, I think).
Since then, I’ve sampled many from micro-breweries and orchards, but none have had the impact of that first experience.
We’ve been pining for a chance to drive to the east end of Long Island to get some jugs of Woodside Orchards hard cider. Their baseline traditional is just fantastic, and some of their flavored ciders are pretty nice too.
We used to have an apple tree in our front yard that produced hundreds of apples. I got myself a high-capacity juicer and made my own hard cider. Made and bottled several 5 gallon batches over the course of a few years. It was some tasty cider!
I’d add a certain amount of dissolved brown sugar to bring the specific gravity up high enough to get 5-6% alcohol content. I don’t know if that’s normal for hard cider making or if my apples were just low in sugar content— they were fairly sour to eat raw, but not too bad.
I’d get cider yeast from a beer and wine making shop, but I didn’t sterilize the raw cider first, so my fermentation process was a mix of the cider yeast and wild yeasts already on the apples.
Sadly, the tree stopped producing apples a few years after we moved in, then died after a particularly hard winter.
Today apples are pretty much available year round but hard cider has been historically seasonal. This is why I assume you are seeing lots of them now, and I suspect it will shrink in other seasons. Around here it is still common for end of season apple pickers to ask to go around orchards and pick up any left behind fruit to make home brewed cider, in general the more overripe it is the better.
My favorite is another New England cider, Stormalong’s Legendary Dry. It’s unfortunately not available around here in NC and what is available is in general abysmal. Too many ciders adulterated with non-apple fruits or spices and the NC concept of a dry cider is … most often barely semi-dry.
The best I’ve found that is local is Standard Bearer from Asheville cider and mead makers Noble.
Cider makers in New England appear to be able to provide enough to keep shelves stored year round. Whether that’s due to warehousing apples, apple juice or the finished product I do not know.
Eden in Vermont is good. I also like Albemarle Ciderworks outside of Charlottesville, but I think that has smaller distribution. Local distribution seems more common than not. I went to some cider event in Alexandria a few years back that had two dozen or so companies from Virginia, but I think Bold Rock was the only one that I’ve seen farther away.
I mostly prefer very little residual sugar but Eden makes some ice ciders that are more like dessert wines, which I’ll occasionally enjoy.
Trees have a natural lifespan [apple I think is 80, but I would have to go look] so the orchard that had been there had probably been planted in your grandparents time. I know we slogged into the orchard my grandfather planted in 1919 back about 10 years ago, and nobody had been tending it, so the trees were overgrown, gnarly, producing crabapples, and dying off - like half the branches were dead and very few new terminal buds. Very sad, it was a small orchard [about 1 acre, 2 plum, 2 pear, and 8 apple trees] but my grandfather was proud of it. It provided fruit for the family during the depression. [my dad and uncles had a chicken coop, and they raised chickens and eggs for the local grocery store, gave them a small amount of money and trade goods, the factories were being supported by the family savings so money was pretty much nonexistant for luxuries.] There was a 2 acre garden as well, with about half an acre of bushes - raspberries, elderberries and an asparagus patch. I learned to can from my grandmother’s cook/maid of all work and my mom [who grew up on a farm in Iowa in the depression]
Locally, East End Brewing has a very good hard cider. My daughter tried it at an event recently and the brewer mentioned that they sourced their fruit locally, from ******** Farm.
My daughter’s jaw dropped and she told the brewer her dad lived next door to the farm. He replied, “oh, your kayaker’s daughter!”
Amazing coincidence. When the brewer picked up a load of apples I happened to be there and we talked beer.